The growth of the city of Delhi witnessed the establishment of a large number of small and large-scale industrial units. Emissions and effluent from these industries affected environmental as well as human health. Controlling industrial pollution became the need of time. Concerning the environment-related issues, the Hon'ble Court directed the Government of Delhi to build a Common Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP). CETP constructions were looked after by the Environment and pollution control committee. Today, the Department of Environment and Delhi Pollution Control Board looks after all the environmental concerns on behalf of the Government of Delhi.

Among all the constructed 13 treatment plants, Bawana is one of the CETP developed by Delhi State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Pvt Ltd (DSIIDC). It can treat up to 35 million liters of daily effluent discharged by the industries in the Bawana Industrial Area.

DSIIDC through Bawana ties hands with PTESPL for continuously tracking discharge quality. Challenges were observed when the site was inspected since the existing pollution monitoring system continuously failed to perform up to the expectations. Whereas PTESPL team was able to identify areas where the performance could have been better. Understanding the application, OPRUSS OPM 300 was implemented for effluent monitoring. System-related information, its features, operation, etc., were provided to the client.

Further to add the advantages of the Automatica module to remotely diagnose and swiftly validate the status and performance was a key highlight for the DSIIDC executives, since earlier system failed due to deficiency of attention by service provider as stated by them.

As a standard operating procedure of installing OPRUSS analysers, 5 grab samples of effluent of various time instances were submitted in reputed laboratories for analysis of parameters Chemical Oxygen Demand, Biochemical Oxygen Demand, Total Dissolved Solids, Total Suspended Solids, and pH. The analysis report depicted a large difference in the measured and actual value of COD when compared.
As per the remarks of officers on field, this was one of the reasons why they preferred traditional analysis for evaluation of COD.

Whereas there was an easy but tricky reason for justifying the variation of reading. The OPM Series has a smart function of modulating primary measured values with respect to various background factors that affect the error in reading such as temperature, environment factor, specific conductivity, colored sample, etc. Also that the TDS value obtained from the analysis depicted a larger value compared to its COD organic index. With the help of the Automatica module, the OPM300 sensor was configured for High TDS results which automatically helped the sensor to calculate and compensate inorganic COD addition to the measured COD index.

Figure 2. OPRUSS Automatica

The theory behind this logic is such that the majority of industries that are connected with specific CETP are plastic injection molding manufacturers and others that barely have any organic contents in the effluent. Whereas typical COD, BOD, TSS sensors available in the market measure only the Organic COD due to the fact that UV-Vis Spectrophotometry is effective to only elements with Carbon present in it.

That should be the potential reason why they had to choose the OPRUSS OPM Series solution over earlier products and a specific reason why a service provider is needed rather than a supplier to understand such important aspects.

Figure 3. Trending graph of effluent ranges from different industries analysed with OPRUSS Automatica

IoT-based sensors help to monitor the water/effluent on a real-time basis and transfer the data to the server for easy data access. Various sensors analyze different aspects and provide accurate readings by converting the signals into RS-485 output. Thanks to the advantage of Advanced Conductive Surface Cleaning (ACSC) feature that helps to keep the analyzers clean with remote operation functionality.

OCEMS installation has helped Bawana CETP to monitor the effluent on a real-time basis, get real-time alerts, and access the historical logs and data. Treated effluent within permissible range is discharged and reused for various purposes such as gardening, domestic use, horticulture, green belts, parks, etc. This maintains the freshness of water bodies and controls getting them polluted further anymore.

By the completion of a year of system installation, it is in operation successfully along with a positive note from the client.